Wright and Wrong

RALEIGH, N.C. --- If Barack Obama's crushing win in North Carolina and near victory in Indiana do, indeed, derail Hillary Clinton's scorched-earth struggle for Democratic souls, roughly 100,000 people can finally stop spinning in their graves.

I've been watching how news agencies have been handling a pair of pratfalls that the media finally stumbled over at roughly the same time: Clinton's claim that she dodged sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia in 1996; and footage showing Obama's pastor ripping the United States a new one by, among other things, saying the country deserved to be attacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.

Now, I'm not going to defend the polarizing remarks made by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a former U.S. Marine. Then again, I'm not a member of an ethnic group kidnapped from its homeland, enslaved, slaughtered, lynched and generally denied human rights or equal opportunities for hundreds of years. If I was, I'd probably have a chip on my shoulder, too.

Obama followed the dust-up with one of the greatest speeches on equality in America since, well, the Gettysburg Address.

What appalled the hell out of me was Clinton chortling about how she visited Bosnia and was greeted by sniper fire and had to run for cover. (If you want to grimace at how easily lies roll off the candidate's tongue, check the footage of her actual arrival here.)

After roughly her third claim to heroism was proved a fantasy, Clinton played the old foggy memory trick. Despite this self-aggrandizing grab for delegates, she kept hammering at the Rev. Wright issue.

According to the Google newspaper archive, -- which isn't perfect, but in this case blows to bits any margin for error -- newspapers mentioned the Wright saga 21,725 times in the four weeks following April 7. Was Hillary's train-wreck attempt meant to co-op some combat cred in Bosnia? Only 71 newspapers brought it up during the same period.

Plenty of journalists, politicians, and celebrities like to have a brush with a war zone on their resumes. Plenty more keep the horrors they've seen, the close calls they evaded, deep inside. Some -- but not enough -- know that their encounters with the victims of war were a much larger issue than whatever personal peril they might have encountered.

Then there are those who compensate for their cowardice by savagely attacking an actual war hero, such as Sen. John Kerry. Yet battle envy is a powerful thing; I can't help but think that George W. Bush's jump into a fighter jet was an attempt to compensate for dodging the Vietnam War draft.

By claiming to have been a part of post-Cold War chaos, Hillary Clinton insulted the estimated 100,000 people who died -- and hundreds of thousands of those who lost limbs and loved ones -- during the Bosnian War that was long over by the time she touched down in March 1996.

I was dispatched there by my news agency in December 1995, to help cover NATO's effort to put in place the Dayton Peace Accord that ended the war. The most danger I encountered was the guard dog at our Sarajevo headquarters.

One of my tasks was to find people who managed to survive the shelling and shooting that rained down on the city for so long, causing many to not leave their homes in four years. And hearing Hillary seek to place herself among them, to me, dwarfed whatever rants unleashed by a fire-and-brimstone preacher who actually was more akin to the beleaguered Bosnians.

There's a certain softness, a certain insecurity, among many Americans who managed to avoid being swept up in a conflict. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were horrific reminders of the world in which we live, but the mourning has yet to subside, and the site of the World Trade Center remains a necropolis, a hole in the ground overrun by tourists. At least when the British burned down the White House during the War of 1812, Americans hunkered down and just rebuilt the damn place.

I had one of the best seats in the house -- the commuter docks in Hoboken, NJ., dead level with Manhattan's twin towers across the Hudson River -- when the buildings were reduced to rubble. In the days that followed, friends from around the world sent me e-mails or rang me up, offering comfort and condolences even though I lived far away (New Jersey), was absolutely safe, and knew nobody who'd worked in the towers.

The sheer magnitude of the nation's urge to empathize with the Sept. 11 victims, to feel a sense that they all dodged a bullet, was abruptly put in perspective when I clicked to open a message of heart-felt sympathy laced with a prayer for this country's future.

It came from a Bosnian colleague who had survived five years of conflict. She'd never chuckled when I asked her about her life in the city, surrounded by an enemy which would not hesitate to launch a mortar round at women and children waiting in a bread line.

She didn't want to talk about it at all. But then, she wasn't desperately running for public office, using the lives and deaths of others as fodder in the hopes that voters would buy into her warrior fantasy. She was just running for her life.

Comments

[frustratedinohio]

Why don't you try to let it go. All the anger you have for Hillary, well I hope you find another outlet for expressing it. You and all the other Obama supporters out here. What will you do when you don't have Hillary to kick around anymore. Besides your topic was relevant a month ago. Most of us have moved on, try to do the same. Take me for instance, I was a Hillary supporter, now I come out to HuffPo to get the latest trash on my new candidate, McCain.